Hmm, this must be a Perl specific issue since I've never experienced this kind of problem with Python (although, I'm waiting for the day when Apple ships OS X with Python 3...that should be fun). It sucks that you have to go through all of this just to maintain a reasonable Perl installation.

Thanks for the tip. How much of a pain is it with an odd shebang line (for portability)?

For me it is no pain at all, since I only code for myself on the Mac that will run the code.

For a developer working outside of Xcode, it is always a pain on OSX. Even if you change the bang line back to the usual /usr/bin/perl, you have no guarantee of where external modules reside on the target machine - or even if they exist at all. I have enough trouble trying to get modules and links to migrate to the next version of OSX, without even thinking about trying to get it to run on someone else's machine.

If you are are just coding plain Perl, then you might just as well stick to the OSX version and it will work fine. But if you use external modules, then you are probably up the creek. You would almost have to publish (to a non Perl/OSX techie) a whole set of documentation of how install the needed modules to make your code work. Once they saw that, I doubt that they would even download your code, let alone install it.

I don't think that Apple is anti Perl (or Python or Ruby or...), just that they don't worry about anything outside of Xcode. Kind of like Microsoft's attitude for years of, "If you aren't running Visual Basic or Visual C, then why are you bothering to write a program?"